E2B vs Daytona vs Blaxel: AI sandbox comparison

Your coding agent clones a repository, installs dependencies, runs the test suite, and proposes a patch. Then the user spends ten minutes reading the diff. In this scenario, the sandbox bills compute the entire time. When the user returns, the environment has either been killed or needs a second or more to wake up. At 10,000 sessions a month, you're paying for idle machines and shipping a laggy product at once.

The sandbox layer decides both outcomes. E2B, Daytona, and Blaxel all execute untrusted, AI-generated code in isolated environments. They differ on idle time and on whether memory survives a pause. They also differ on how much networking you build yourself. This comparison covers isolation models, lifecycle mechanics, networking, pricing, and the buyer scenarios where each platform wins.

TL;DR

• E2B is the open-source reference point for AI sandboxes. Continuous runtime caps at 24 hours on Pro. Pro costs $150/month before the first second of compute. Best for teams that want Apache 2.0 code and Bring Your Own Cloud (BYOC) on AWS or GCP.
• Daytona pivoted from developer environments to agent sandboxes in 2025. The default sandbox auto-stops after 15 minutes of inactivity. Best for teams that need Ruby or Java SDKs, GPU sandboxes, or Windows VMs.
• Blaxel is the infrastructure foundation for autonomous agents. Each sandbox runs in its own microVM with a dedicated guest kernel. Sandboxes drop to standby once connections close and resume with memory intact. Best for coding agents first, then PR review and data analysis agents in production.

What is E2B?

E2B is a sandbox platform from FoundryLabs, Inc., founded in San Francisco in 2023. Each sandbox runs as a Firecracker microVM, created from a template in about 150 milliseconds. The default timeout is 5 minutes. The main repository and infrastructure code carry the Apache 2.0 license.

The company sells BYOC deployments on AWS and GCP. E2B raised a $21 million Series A in July 2025 led by Insight Partners, for roughly $32 million total. Its customer list includes Hugging Face, Manus, and Perplexity.

What is Daytona?

Daytona is an agent sandbox platform from Daytona Platforms Inc., founded by Ivan Burazin. The company sunset its developer-environment product in February 2025 and launched the sandbox platform in late April 2025.

The default sandbox class is a Linux container; Linux VM, Windows VM, and GPU classes are also available. SDKs ship for Python, TypeScript, Ruby, Go, and Java. Daytona raised a $24 million Series A on February 5, 2026, led by FirstMark Capital. Its customer list includes LangChain and SambaNova.

What is Blaxel?

Blaxel is the infrastructure foundation for autonomous agents: the execution layer where agent code runs. The company came out of Y Combinator's Spring 2025 batch. Each sandbox runs in its own microVM with the root filesystem held in memory, so deleting a sandbox erases its data. When an agent's connections close, the sandbox snapshots its filesystem, memory, and running processes into standby.

Three primitives make up the platform.

• Compute: Sandboxes and Batch Jobs.
• Storage: Volumes, plus Agent Drive, a shared filesystem in private preview.
• Networking: custom domains, dedicated egress gateways (private preview), and proxy secrets injection.

SDKs ship for Python, TypeScript, and Go. Blaxel is SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified. A Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) Business Associate Agreement (BAA) is available as an add-on. It is a first-class sandbox provider in the OpenAI Agents SDK. Webflow, Delty, Jazzberry, and Build0 run production agents on it.

Feature comparison: Blaxel vs E2B vs Daytona

The table compares the dimensions that decide whether an agent sandbox holds up in production. Figures come from each vendor's documentation.

E2B and Blaxel both isolate at the microVM level; Daytona documentation also describes its sandboxes as running as microVMs. The bigger split is idle handling, which sets both your monthly bill and how long a returning user waits.

When Blaxel is the better choice

Each competitor loses to Blaxel on a different axis. Against E2B, the gap is session length and production networking. Against Daytona, it's the isolation boundary and what survives idle time.

Blaxel over E2B: long sessions and networking you don't self-host

E2B's Pro plan caps continuous runtime at 24 hours, and Hobby caps it at 1 hour. E2B's billing docs state that a single continuous sandbox run on Pro is limited to 24 hours, but sandboxes can exist longer and workloads can exceed 24 hours by using pause and resume. You avoid the wall by pausing, but the default onTimeout action is "kill". Blaxel handles the transition for you. When the agent's connections close, the sandbox drops to standby, and the full state comes back on the next request. Delty analyzes about 5,000 pull requests a month on Blaxel.

Networking is the second gap. E2B custom domains require a reverse proxy you operate on your own VM. E2B offers no static egress IPs on any plan, and secrets are environment variables the sandbox can read. Blaxel manages custom domains and ships dedicated egress gateways in private preview for static outbound IPs. It also resolves secrets server-side through proxy secrets injection. The sandbox only ever sees a {{SECRET:name}} placeholder. Region policies for data residency sit on top of Blaxel's SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, and HIPAA coverage. You get compute, storage, and networking from one vendor instead of a sandbox plus a networking stack your team maintains.

Blaxel over Daytona: a kernel per sandbox and memory that survives idle time

Daytona's default sandbox is a Linux container that Daytona's docs describe as isolated with a dedicated kernel, filesystem, network stack, and allocated resources. Daytona's Linux VM class adds a dedicated guest kernel as an opt-in. Blaxel gives every sandbox its own guest kernel inside a microVM. That raises the escape boundary from a shared kernel to a hardware-enforced one. For code an LLM wrote seconds earlier, that boundary is the baseline requirement.

Lifecycle is the second difference. A Daytona container sandbox auto-stops after 15 minutes of inactivity. Stopping preserves the filesystem but not memory or running processes, because container sandboxes don't support pause. After 7 days stopped, auto-archive moves the filesystem to object storage by default. Blaxel snapshots memory and processes along with the filesystem, and standby has no duration cap on Tier 2 and above. Webflow switched from CodeSandbox to Blaxel to power its AI website builder and real-time AI-generated code previews. Jazzberry eliminated the sandbox crashes and memory pressure that had been causing downtime after moving to Blaxel.

When E2B may fit better

E2B fits teams whose infrastructure strategy requires owning the stack. Three things it gives you that Blaxel doesn't:

• Apache 2.0 core repository and infrastructure, with self-hosting through Terraform.
• BYOC on AWS or GCP, keeping templates, snapshots, and logs in your VPC, plus on-premises deployment.
• Code Interpreter runtimes out of the box: Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, R, Java, and Bash.
• Forking, which clones a running sandbox from its exact in-memory state.

Blaxel's closest equivalents are covered in the objections section below, and they stop short of a self-hosted control plane. One framing point on open source: Blaxel is a fully managed cloud platform with open-source components such as its sandbox API and controller, while E2B's open-source code is available and production E2B is also offered as a managed service. The 24-hour cap and Pro floor apply to the hosted product whether or not you read the code.

When Daytona may fit better

Daytona fits teams whose host application isn't Python, TypeScript, or Go. Four cases favor it:

• Ruby and Java SDKs. On Blaxel, Ruby, Java, and Rust teams call the REST API rather than a first-class SDK.
• GPU sandboxes on H100 and H200 hardware, alongside a Windows VM class. GPU sandboxes are ephemeral by design: deleted on stop, and free credits can't be spent on them.
• BYOC through the daytona-region Helm chart, plus dedicated single-organization regions through sales.
• Volumes at no additional cost, up to 100 per organization, and a startup program offering up to $50,000 in credits.

Weigh those against the closed-source transition. Daytona moved core development to a private codebase, and the public daytonaio/daytona repository no longer receives updates. Teams that shortlisted Daytona for its open-source posture should re-check that assumption before signing.

Pricing comparison

E2B and Daytona charge the same headline compute rate. The bill diverges on what happens when the agent goes quiet. All figures below use 1 vCPU + 2 GB RAM, equivalent to a Blaxel XS sandbox, running for one hour. They are current as of September 2026, from E2B's billing documentation and Daytona's published pricing page.

Coding-agent sandboxes sit idle for most of a session while the human reads output and decides what to ask next.

On Daytona's documented defaults, sandboxes auto-stop after 15 minutes of inactivity, and in the Paused state vCPU and RAM are not billed—only disk is billed—so there is no 15-minute compute charge per idle pause. After migrating its agentic workloads to Blaxel, Build0 cut sandbox costs by 80%, mainly by eliminating a 10-minute idle tail on every interaction.

Blaxel pricing

• Free: Free tier plus usage-based costs
• Pre-configured sandbox tiers and usage-based pricing: See Blaxel's pricing page for the most up-to-date pricing information
• Available add-ons: Email support, live Slack support, HIPAA compliance

Key differentiators and objection handling

Three objections come up in nearly every evaluation against these two platforms.

"E2B is open source and the category standard. Why pick a closed managed vendor?" Because the hosted product is what you'd run in production. E2B's Apache 2.0 code exists, but the managed service carries the same 24-hour cap and Pro floor. Self-hosting E2B means operating Firecracker infrastructure through Terraform yourself. That's the DevOps headcount a managed sandbox was supposed to remove.

The SDK layer isn't where lock-in lives either. Blaxel, E2B, and Daytona are all first-class sandbox providers in the OpenAI Agents SDK, so switching the client is a small code change. Lifecycle and networking don't abstract away, and that's where Blaxel's managed domains, egress gateways (private preview), and automatic standby earn the choice.

"Daytona creates sandboxes in under 90 milliseconds. Isn't that faster than Blaxel?" For creation from a pre-built snapshot, yes. Custom images are typically built into a snapshot before reuse, and Blaxel's template creation is slower, as the table shows. But creation happens once per session. Waking from idle happens every time the user comes back, which for a coding agent is many times per session. Daytona's container class can't pause. Each return either hits a sandbox you paid 15 minutes for or a cold restart from disk. Blaxel resumes from standby with memory intact in under 25 milliseconds.

"We need to run this inside our own infrastructure." Then E2B or Daytona fits that requirement. E2B offers self-hosting, BYOC on AWS and GCP, and on-premises deployment. Daytona offers BYOC through its Helm chart. Blaxel has no air-gapped install. Bring Your Own Metal (BYOM) runs the sandbox runtime on your bare metal. Data may leave your hardware during execution, depending on how the model endpoint and infrastructure are configured. VPC interconnect keeps traffic off the public internet.

How to choose between E2B vs Daytona vs Blaxel for your AI agent

Start from your idle profile rather than your creation benchmark. If your agent sessions are short and stateless and you want to own the infrastructure, E2B's Apache 2.0 stack and BYOC options fit. If your host app is Ruby or Java, Daytona has first-class SDKs.

Daytona additionally covers GPU and Windows sandbox classes. Coding agents, PR review agents, and data analysis agents hold sessions open for hours while a human reads and decides. Two things decide the fit: what happens during idle time, and what the sandbox looks like when the user returns.

That's the workload Blaxel was built for. MicroVM isolation gives every sandbox its own kernel for code an LLM generated moments ago. Network-based auto-shutdown moves the sandbox to standby shortly after connections close or go idle, using built‑in timeouts (such as a 15‑minute idle timeout for ongoing connections) rather than user‑configured stop/start controls. Perpetual standby on Tier 2 and above holds filesystem, memory, and running processes with zero compute charge.

Resume from standby lands before the user notices. Managed custom domains, dedicated egress gateways in private preview, and proxy secrets injection reduce the self-managed networking work required by alternatives: E2B's custom-domain and static-egress patterns rely on user-operated proxies, while Daytona offers its own outbound proxy and secrets-injection model.

Review the full stack on the Blaxel products page, then sign up free and run your own agent's idle profile against it. Teams evaluating for a large deployment can book a demo to walk through networking and compliance requirements.

FAQs

Do E2B, Daytona, and Blaxel all preserve sandbox state between agent sessions?

Not equally. E2B's default pause() saves filesystem and memory, and paused sandboxes are retained indefinitely. But your code, an explicit stop() call, or an onTimeout: "pause" setting has to trigger the pause. Daytona's default container class preserves only the filesystem on stop. Memory and running processes are lost when a container sandbox stops, and true pause and resume are supported by VM sandboxes such as Linux VM and Windows. Blaxel snapshots filesystem, memory, and running processes automatically once connections close, and restores all three on resume. Standby has no duration cap on Tier 2 and above. For guaranteed long-term retention beyond standby, Blaxel recommends Volumes, and Agent Drive (private preview) shares files across running sandboxes.

Which platform is cheapest for agents that spend most of their time idle?

At equal compute rates, the platform that stops billing soonest after the agent goes quiet wins. E2B and Daytona both charge $0.0504 per vCPU-hour and $0.0162 per GiB-hour, per their published pricing pages (September 2026). Daytona's container class runs 15 minutes past the last activity by default, and E2B runs until paused or killed. Blaxel stops compute charges shortly after connections close and bills only snapshot storage during standby. The gap compounds with session count. Build0 attributed its sandbox cost reduction to removing a 10-minute idle tail per interaction. Run your own numbers with your median idle gap before deciding.

Can I use all three with the OpenAI Agents SDK?

Yes. Blaxel, E2B, and Daytona are each first-class sandbox providers in the OpenAI Agents SDK, alongside Cloudflare, Modal, Runloop, and Vercel. Blaxel's Python client ships as the openai-agents[blaxel] extra. The TypeScript client lives at @openai/agents-extensions/sandbox/blaxel. The SDK abstracts the client call and also provides abstractions for sandbox lifecycle, timeouts, and networking, while billing follows standard API pricing rather than being specially abstracted by the SDK.